Control Tech

Friday, 9 December 2016

The product I think was highly successful. I created the Micro:bit resource in order to demonstrate the final product to the teachers today. As a whole our lead up to this was good to. The final brief for the students microbit monster was strong, clean and concise. Again it was a very open resource so it was up to the teachers to present this as they wish - whether they had open some of the other tutorials or had these hidden away, or whether they had no help at all (or worked in pairs!). We had a clear guideline - you must include x, y, z and to make this better include even more!
It was accessible for students and teachers alike and as a whole I believe rounded up all the individual sessions nicely. The worksheet that went with this could have been slightly improved upon but this was only a potential sheet - again it was up to the teachers as to whether they wanted to use this.
The overall homework task worked nicely too - it connected with the brief and joint all the sessions together. We provided a small example of what could be accomplished by the end of the sessions for this too.

I felt my Accelerometer resource was fairly strong. I had a brief explanation as to what the accelerometer did, followed by what the Magic 8 ball is and a fun website that runs on the same concept as the magic 8 ball.
By using step by step instructions with explanations as to why they are selecting x tab, and why you have to create numbers for the magic 8 ball to relate to the phrases provided, I felt the resource was strong - a teacher or student who have never coded before could easily try to use the resource and most likely succeed. Teachers have a better understanding of their pupils abilities, and I'd rather make the resource as detailed as possible to they can takeaway ideas and steps, than make it 'underdone' as some teachers may not think the resource is open enough or accessible enough for their pupils to understand.

By keeping the resource itself as open as possible it enables teachers to create lots of ways of making the lesson their own. For example I gave suggestions as to how the work could be done in pairs or in teams or even individually. I also gave suggestions as to how the teacher could compare the 8 ball micro:bit to a board game which meant that the children using the resource might find it more relatable.

We were originally going to use Mix and not Sway to create the resource - we chose to switch as we liked that sway was different to the standard PowerPoint set up - some children might prefer this and find it more engaging. Another pro of using Sway for us was that it is very easy to duplicate - we shared our resources with Aidan via duplicating our original and allowing him to edit them - all online which is great as if it you loose a memory stick or something that holds your normal files, it is still available online.

One of the great features about Sway is that is fairly basic - it hasn't got too many additional bells and whistles. This means that pupils will be less distracted and hopefully remain more on tasks - it remains clear and concise. However there are a wide range of things that we have still used to make the resources more fun and engaging - such as Kahoot and Magic 8 ball.